Other Make a Difference Day celebs:
Writer Anchee Min on the value of education
Wally Lamb brings the expressiveness of writing to prison inmates
Bestselling author Matthew Klam is enriched by a handicapped child
Robert Putnam, writer of Bowling Alone, is optimistic toward youth
Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays With Morrie, finds his late teacher's words live on.
Arthur author Marc Brown believes where kids read, kids help others
Christopher Paul Curtis, author of Bud, Not Buddy, hails a hero he overlooked -- his dad.
Ana Castillo, poet and author, tells how a gathering replenishes women who make a difference.
Ann Hood, author of Ruby and the upcoming Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time, comforts the spirit by feeding the sad, the lost and the lonely.
Justin Timberlake makes a difference through music
Wish You Well writer David Baldacci, learns a lesson from young writers
Patricia Cornwell, writer of The Last Precinct recalls what a world-renowned evangelist did for a scared little girl

Marc Parent, author of Turning Stones: My Days & Nights With Children at Risk, recalls a dying woman and a pet in need.

Two Lives

had forgotten to turn off my pager. I was packing my things for home at the close of my shift when it went off. 4259, the nursing station on Mulenberg. The AIDS floor -- rooms occupied by uninsured junkies, hookers and various other forgottens. Closing the last buttons of my jacket and cinching a scarf around my neck, I made the call. A woman in 12-B desperately needed to see a social worker. Something about a cat.

I stood at the patient's bedside -- a late-20s white woman in the final stages of her disease, who had been admitted after the recent onset of blindness. Now the rest of her organs, one by one, were slowly giving up as well. But that's not what had her on the verge of panic.

"The cops arrested my boyfriend," she said, her blank eyes uselessly searching my face. "He just called from jail. My cat has been locked in our apartment without food for four days." She thrust her keys out. "You have to get her."

It wouldn't be right for me not to admit that my first thought was of the dinner party my wife was throwing for two other couples at our apartment -- the one I would all but miss if I went for the cat.

"I can't stand the thought of her suffering alone. Please," she begged shaking the keys from her fist. "Just open the door and let her out. At least she'll have a chance."

It seemed unlikely I might enjoy a dinner party after ignoring the last wishes of a dying woman and letting a cat starve to death.

"Give me the keys."

"Be careful," she said through tears as I left. "It's a dangerous building -- lots of addicts and dealers."

On the ride uptown, I tried to talk my cabby into adopting the cat. He said that his wife takes in every stray she sees and he doesn't like cats to begin with.

"How long is cat without food?" he asked through a thick Polish accent.

"Four days."

"This is dead cat, I think," he said and then described a piece he'd read in the paper about the enormous number of cats dying each day in New York. The longer he went on, the lower the sun got, the higher the street numbers went, the crazier it seemed to be risking my neck to save a single cat that was probably already dead.

At the building, an ominous-looking group of men huddled around the entrance. "It's supposed to be a dangerous building," I told my cabby. He looked back at me as I undid my tie and put it in my pocket. Then he reached over to turn off the meter and grab a cigarette. "I go with you," he said.

At the apartment door, we could hear meowing. "We only have to let it out," I said, expecting a fat, arthritic calico, but as we stepped inside, a small cat raced from the darkness into my arms -- young, black with white tufted paws, a thin silver bracelet circling her neck. "This is good cat," my cabby said, his mouth turned down and his eyebrows high.

It's only a matter of time before you reach a moment in life when you're confronted with the choice of saying yes or no to a desperate cat. This was my moment. The cat knew it, nestling up under my chin.

We went home.

"You're late, honey," my wife said from the top of the stairs. I could hear the guests in our apartment behind her. "What's in the box?"

"A cat," I said.

"Late and a cat," she said turning inside, and we had a nice dinner anyway.

The next morning, I went to 12-B to give the woman her cat's silver bracelet. She pushed it onto her thin wrist and then cried into her palms. She thanked me. I told her my wife and I would keep the cat. "What's her name?" I asked, hoping for an Odessa, a Milo, even a Freddi.

"Linda," the woman said, through tears. My shoulders fell. A cat named Linda.

We kept her despite the name, until the arrival of our first son and the ongoing battle whether it was her tail or his eyeball that would eventually be destroyed. So Linda changed hands once again, moving just outside the city to a friend's farmhouse.

The woman in 12-B died a month after I had met her. In that time, we had gotten to know each other well. "Why 'Linda?' " I finally asked on one of my last visits.

"In Spanish," she said, "it means 'beautiful.' "

That was five years ago. The cat is still alive -- still with the same couple, although they've renamed her Lilly and moved to a luxury flat in Santa Fe. My wife and I joke about our Spanish Harlem cat living in the New Age West, working through issues of her rocky childhood. No matter what her name or where she lives, she'll always be Linda the crack house cat to me. A silver bracelet around her neck and the woman who loved her, one patient on Mulenberg I haven't forgotten.

NEXT WEEK: Ana Castillo, poet and novelist, on making a difference

Photo by ROB KINMONTH for USA WEEKEND